What is Anthropology

Social Anthropology is the study of humans with shared practices, values, worldviews, institutions and economic forms that lead to identification of people with groups. Therefore most anthropological works contribute to understanding how societies are culturally similar or diverse. Anthropologists share a commitment to long-term fieldwork with participant observation generating in depth qualitative research data. Scholars usually specialize on a) theoretical topics and b) particular regions. They explore what results from research in a particular region can tell us for our general understanding of the topic in question.

Our research

In our research, we strive to understand e.g. the identities, livelihoods and ways of life of the people in the Arctic, people's adaptation to social, economic, political and ecological change; people’s relation to the industrial development, as well as the roles of the humans and the environment in the adaptation of Arctic domestic species.

The fieldwork is focused especially on Northern Fennoscandia, Northwest Russia, West Siberia, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and Kamtchatka. However, our academic interest is in topics rather than a particular region.

Arctic Anthropology Research Group

We are a number of anthropologists based in Finnish Lapland with a shared enthusiasm for our discipline and an interest in the North as a space for living and doing research among its inhabitants. Our research and theoretical interests are diverse, but united by the conviction that we can contribute to general debates in our discipline ‘from the North’, i.e. by combining evidence from our fieldwork with theoretical interests.

Our group is particularly strongly rooted in the tradition of British Social Anthropology. Our expertise is currently strong in theories, conceptions and ideas about space, landscape and mobility in the North, topics that unite all of us. We find links to these topics in almost every corner of the North, in our practice and our conversations with friends and informants among the inhabitants of the North.

Talking to a friend in Se Yakha, at the shore of the Ob Bay close to the Kara Sea, I realised how far the consequences of the recent Norilsk oil spill could go: the recent New York Times article about the oil spill cite environmentalists and even a Russian minister saying that the consequences of …

Dear all, I’m contributing to an expert document on the impacts of COVID-19 in the Arctic. I think it is essential that we highlight research gaps that we notice as anthropologists working in the Arctic. I would like to invite everybody to use the comment function here in this blog to highlight what anthropologists in …

The warm weather in Siberia seems to have led to an exceptionally early ice-thawing on Siberia’s major rivers. The specific of the river geography here is that all the major rivers flow from south to north, into the Arctic Ocean. This means the ice melts in the south first, and then the water pushes into …